I’ve been driving a tow truck for eleven years. Manchester roads, mostly — the ring roads, the industrial estates, the sad little residential streets where someone’s parked half on a double yellow and half on someone else’s patience. You see a lot in this job. Drunks, crashes, cars abandoned after joyrides. You get immune to it, basically. Nothing surprises you after long enough.
I thought that, anyway. I genuinely believed it.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw the Vauxhall Cavalier.
It was a Tuesday in February — close to midnight, freezing, that horrible wet Manchester cold that gets into your jacket no matter how good it is. I’d been called out to Ancoats. Some burgundy Cavalier left blocking a loading bay, no tax, no plates. The kind of car that’s been dying slowly for years and someone just… left it to finish the job.
I mean, nothing unusual. I hooked it up, did my checks, drove it back to the pound on Trafford Road. Standard.
It wasn’t until I was filling in the paperwork that I opened the boot to log the contents.
I don’t know how to describe what I smelled. Not a body — I’ve unfortunately been near enough of those to know. This was older. Like soil and something sweet underneath it. Rotting flowers, maybe. Inside the boot there was nothing except a child’s shoe. One shoe. A small white plimsoll, maybe a size two, sitting perfectly in the centre of the boot like someone had placed it there carefully.
I stood there for a moment. Then I closed the boot, finished the paperwork, and told myself it meant nothing.
I should have trusted my instincts right then.
About three weeks later, I was out past Salford, picking up an abandoned vehicle on a canal towpath — which was already strange because the towpath had a locked gate at both ends. I mean, you’re looking at this car thinking: how did it get here? The council bloke who called it in couldn’t explain it either. Just shrugged and said sometimes kids find a way.
The car was a burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier.
Obviously I told myself it was a different one. Cavaliers aren’t rare. Loads of them were made. I pulled out my job sheet from February and checked the make and colour, but I hadn’t logged the chassis number — why would I? I had no reason to think I’d need it.
I felt my heart sink a little when I opened the boot.
Same smell. Same sweet, earthy, wrong smell. And sitting in the centre of the boot — a child’s shoe. White plimsoll. Tiny.
I called it in. The duty sergeant was polite but clearly thought I was winding him up. “Probably the same car escaped the pound,” he said, which was such a non-answer I nearly laughed. Escaped. Right.
I kept driving. I told myself I was being paranoid. I told myself there was an explanation.
Looking back, I realise I stopped checking the boots after that. Not consciously. I just… stopped doing it. Some part of me didn’t want to find the shoe again.
Then came the job in Stockport.
Late April, maybe eight in the evening. A Cavalier — burgundy, no plates — was reported abandoned outside a primary school on a residential street. When I arrived, I ran a check on the chassis number this time. I was deliberate about it.
The number came back flagged.
The vehicle had been involved in a fatal collision on the M62 in 2019. A family of four. The official report listed the car as a write-off — destroyed, crushed, gone. It did not exist anymore. Except it was sitting in front of me with its headlights somehow still on, even though when I checked, there was no battery.
Something wasn’t right. Something was deeply, fundamentally not right, and I knew it the way you know when you’ve walked into a room where an argument just happened — that charge in the air, that leftover wrongness.
I hooked it up. I don’t know why. Habit, I suppose. You do the job.
I was three miles down the road when I looked in my wing mirror and saw the boot was open. I hadn’t opened it. I’d deliberately not opened it. But it was open — bouncing gently as I drove — and from the motorway lights catching it just right, I could see the boot was empty.
No shoe.
I pulled over on the hard shoulder. I sat there with the engine running and my hazards on, trying to breathe properly. Then I got out, walked to the back of the truck, and looked into the boot of the Cavalier.
The shoe was on my back bumper.
Sitting there. Pointing toward me.
I don’t remember getting back in the truck. I remember being at the pound, shaking, the supervisor asking me if I’d been in an accident. I told him I was coming down with something. I went home and I didn’t sleep.
I changed depots after that. Switched to daytime shifts, different part of the city. New routes, new regulars, new normal. For about four months, everything was fine.
Then last week, I was covering a shift in Didsbury. Routine repossession, residential street, just after dusk.
Burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier. No plates.
I sat in my cab for a long time. The street was quiet. A dog was barking somewhere far off. The car just sat there under the orange streetlight like it had always been there, like it had grown up out of the tarmac.
I’ll never forget what I did next. I got out — slowly, stupidly — and I walked to the back of the car. I put my hand on the boot. Cold. Colder than the air around it, colder than metal should be on a mild night.
I didn’t open it.
I took photos of the chassis number, called it in, told them I wasn’t able to complete the job, and I drove home.
To this day, I still don’t know what would have happened if I’d opened it. Part of me is grateful I’ve still got something left to wonder about. The other part — the part that checks its rear-view mirror more than it used to — isn’t sure that not knowing is any better.
I’ve handed in my notice. I’m done.
The shoe, though. I keep thinking about the shoe.
Whose was it, and where did it go?
